dretblog

Comparing SMS URIs

it was a bit early to declare that the SMS URI scheme was finished. another iteration was required, this time an update to version draft-wilde-sms-uri-20. the main reason was that the draft did not contain any information on how to compare SMS URIs. Section 2.4 now explains how to compare SMS URIs (mostly based on the definition of how to compare to tel: URIs), and (once again...) hopefully that was the last change required before the draft can be published as an RFC.

this is a really long process, but on the other hand it is really good to see that people care enough about this to take a close look and comment on the draft. thanks for all the comments!

SMS URI Scheme Finished

technically speaking, this is just another update of the SMS URI scheme draft (this time to version draft-wilde-sms-uri-19 after submitting versions 18 and 17 earlier this month), but it's going into IETF last call now and it seems that all comments were successfully resolved. there is one lingering issue around whether the optional body text in an SMS URI should have Unicode normalization rules defined for it, but i think it shouldn't. it is up to the software composing the actual SMS message to make sure that any normalization rules are being followed (and i am still a bit unclear if there are any; it seems that there aren't). what happens before that can be any kind of Unicode as long as it's valid Unicode, at least that is what i think makes most sense.

i hope that the optimistic title is not much too optimistic, but it definitely would be great to see this finally being finished. i just checked and realized that version 00 of that draft was published in december 2001, so this really has been under construction for quite a while. the delay was partly caused by some confusion around the IETF URI scheme registration rules and procedures, and around the IETF specification for how to represent telephone numbers, but mostly, it was just me getting sidetracked by other things. i hope this time it's really sufficient to go to RFC, and then, i hope, straight into mobile browser implementations!

SMS URI Scheme Update

only three days after submitting my first SMS URI scheme update after almost a year, the next version (draft-wilde-sms-uri-18) is already available. i hope i am getting close to completion with that one, and the reviews definitely have become friendlier and easier to handle. the only substantial change for version 18 has been to introduce an extension model where future fields extending SMS URIs are already defined by the basic syntax, and have well-defined semantics (a simple mustIgnore; if you don't know an extension, just ignore it).

any comments about this draft are highly welcome! and by the way, here is the web-based I-D tracker for this draft, which means you can simply bookmark that page or even subscribe to its feed, and then you will see every official activity regarding the draft.

SMS URI Scheme Update

after waiting almost a year since the last update, i just submitted a new version (draft-wilde-sms-uri-17) of the URI Scheme for GSM Short Message Service. the draft is (or at least was when i submitted the version 15) in IETF last call, and i hope that it is not too far from completion (but i have been saying that for a really long time now...).

most changes apart from a few minor text edits were based on the really good reviews and feedback for version 16, for example suggesting to be more careful about requiring percent-encoded characters in the <sms-body>, and to be more explicit about the fact that RFC 3966's Erratum 203 is critical for the SMS URI scheme.

any comments about this draft are highly welcome! and by the way, here is the web-based I-D tracker for this draft, which means you can simply bookmark that page or even subscribe to its feed, and then you will see every official activity regarding the draft.

OneSpace 2009: Call for Papers

2nd International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet (OneSpace2009)

In conjunction with the Future Internet Symposium 2009 (FIS2009)

September 1, 2009, Berlin (Germany)

++ Deadline for submission: Aug 07, 2009 ++
++ Full papers and position papers invited ++

The Second International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet (OneSpace2009) will be held in conjunction with the Future Internet Symposium 2009 (FIS2009) in Berlin on 1 September 2009.

We welcome technical papers and shorter position papers addressing the identification and study of the complex relationship of the Internet with space, place, geography and distance, whether physical or virtual. Technologies as well as novel ideas, experiments, and insights originating from multi-disciplinary viewpoints, including internet, computer and GI sciences, humanities, digital media, and social sciences are welcome.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: Aug 07, 2009
• Acceptance Notification: Aug 17, 2009
• Camera-ready paper: Aug 24, 2009
• Workshop date: Sep 01, 2009

Description

OneSpace proposes to contribute to the cross-domain exploration of how Internet technologies and spatial notions co-exist and evolve.

One of the most important effects of the Internet and of the Web has been to relax spatial and temporal constraints on human activities – the so called "space-time collapse" – allowing fast global access to information as well as to physical resources and services. Recently this movement accelerated, due to the success of mobile devices such as the iPhone allowing almost ubiquitous mobile access to the Internet, to the generalisation of digital social interaction through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, to the virtual environments provided on gaming platforms enabled by the Internet, instant communication supported by popular VOIP providers such as Skype, and an emerging web of things. Many now spend as much time involved in digital spaces over the Internet than in "real" ones, and continuously update the digital with elements of their physical life in "lifestreaming" process. Moreover reality itself is augmented by information collected from the Internet, through the increasing availability of GPS devices that ease location based search, or through "magic-lense" based applications that add information to recognized physical elements, or reconstruct them in digital space from various media collected on the Web.

While allowing users to experience a profound modification of their interaction space, the Internet has familiarised us with new topologies – alongside the prominent hyperlinked topology exhibited by the Web, Deleuze and Guattaris's "rhizome", which has become the model of many new forms of organization – leading to the creation of new virtual spaces and communities. Indeed, P2P networks of devices create semi-private sharing environments; (micro-) blogging and lifestreaming induces new notions of spatiotemporal as well as social proximity, while sensor and controller networks enable ubiquitous access, sensing and interaction with the real world. Furthermore, Virtual globes and GIS technologies continue to improve and to blur the boundaries between spatial representation and perception by providing mashup opportunities, photorealistic visual navigation, and three-dimensional representations.

Many agree with what came to be known as Waldo Tobler’s first law of Geography: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." The Internet, by establishing new connections between geographically distant entities cannot but provide us with a radically new image of Space and Time that this workshop is aiming to explore in an interdisciplinary way. OneSpace proposes to take the measure of the aforementioned developments and their repercussion as well as to identify trends and directions for a new future blended Internet.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Representation of physical/virtual spaces and topologies
• Spatiotemporal knowledge representation (ontologies and reasoning)
• The 3D and 4D Web
• Location-based services
• The Web of sensors
• New-generation Web mapping frameworks and applications
• Mobility and ubiquity
• Application of Linked Data for physical and digital spaces
• Digital Sense of Place and Presence
• Visibility and privacy in the Internet of people and things

Submissions

The following types of contributions are welcome:

• Position papers, max. 4 pages
• Technical papers, 4-10 pages

Workshop Organizers

• Vlad Tanasescu - The University of Edinburgh, UK (contact)
• Pierre Grenon – The Open University, UK
• Arno Scharl - MODUL University Vienna, Austria
• Erik Wilde - UC Berkeley, California, USA

Program Committee

(provisional, please check the website for updates)

• Susanne Boll - University of Oldenburg, Germany
• Catherine Dolbear - Sharp Laboratories of Europe, UK
• Stefan Dietze - The Open University, UK
• Hans W. Guesgen - Massey University, New Zealand
• Puneet Kishor - University of Wisconsin, USA
• Vinny Reynolds - National University of Ireland
• Dumitru Roman - STI Innsbruck, Austria
• Mike Worboys - University of Maine, USA

Further information

Updated information about the workshop can be found on the workshop website: http://onespace.ace.ed.ac.uk/2009/. For further information, please send email to
onespace2009@easychair.org.

HTTP over SOAP over HTTP

the W3C just launched a new working group to refine web services resource access specifications. i might be wrong here, because i do not really know the details of what this working group considers to be resource access, but last time i checked, the web was all about resource access, and HTTP was the protocol doing a pretty good job at it.

it really seems to me that the SOAP community is still busy rebuilding the complete internet and web protocol stack on top of the HTTP transport layer, and now they are rebuilding HTTP. i am sure this is not entirely true, but i am worried that it is not completely false, either. this is the beginning of the introduction from one of the deliverables of the new working group, WS-Transfer:

This specification defines a mechanism for acquiring XML-based representations of entities using the Web service infrastructure. It defines two types of entities: Resources, which are entities addressable by an endpoint reference that provide an XML representation, and Resource factories, which are Web services that can create a new resource from an XML representation. Specifically, it defines two operations for sending and receiving the representation of a given resource and two operations for creating and deleting a resource and its corresponding representation.

this sounds a lot like HTTP to me. and then there is this introduction from another one of the deliverables of the new working group, WS-ResourceTransfer (WS-RT):

This specification is intended to form an essential core component of a unified resource access protocol for the Web services space. The operations described in this specification constitute an extension to the WS-Transfer specification, which defines standard messages for controlling resources using the familiar paradigms of get, put, create, and delete. The extensions deal primarily with fragment-based access to resources to satisfy the common requirements of WS-ResourceFramework and WS-Management. This document constitutes WS-ResourceTransfer, hereafter referred to as WS-RT.

if that does not sound a whole lot like HTTP with the idea of fragment identifiers as established through URIs and media types, i don't know. like i said above, i am probably missing some of the finer points about this activity and the proposed specifications, but looking at the general tendency of SOAP to just use HTTP as a transport protocol, i also would not be surprised to see that to a large extent, this new activity is essentially building HTTP over SOAP over HTTP.

unfortunately, the specifications quoted above still use and claim ownership over the terms web services infrastructure and web services space, as if SOAP was the only way to do web services. it is not, and RESTful web services are becoming more and more important. but it is a pity that the web services term is still held captive by such a narrow concept of what a web service is. i am always struggling what to say when i am talking about the wider idea of web services, and often i am falling back to the term web-based services, but this mostly confuses people and many still think i am talking about SOAP. maybe we should start talking about SOAPfree web services or something along these lines...

i would love to be proven wrong here, so if i am missing something essential that would make it impossible to just use HTTP for the resource access specifications targeted in that new working group, i would be interested to learn about it.

iPhone or AT&T?

my Could not activate Cellular Data Network post proves to be pretty popular, so i guess i am far from being the only one getting this message. the interesting questing is whether this problem is an iPhone problem, where the network works fine and the iPhone is just unable to use it, or whether the iPhone works fine and the AT&T network has problems with its data service. without testing, this question cannot be answered, and from the customer perspective, it does not really matter all that much, the simple end result is that i cannot use my iPhone for the service that i am paying for.

the iPhone 2.1 software update promises to give fewer dropped calls, but when even the announcement of such a fix does not claim to just make your phone work, but simply make it a little less unstable than it currently is, i am not very hopeful for getting a working phone out of that.

for me, living with a phone that drops the majority of incoming calls and requires me to hit redial a couple of times before i can call anybody is not all that bad. i am mainly using the data service anyway, and while that also has its issues, on average it at least seems to work better than the phone service.

finding out what exactly is going wrong would be really interesting, however. while the failure to simply connect calls looks like a network problem, on the other hand there seem to be many complaints in other countries as well, so maybe it is the iPhone after all? hard to tell, i guess, since probably many cellphone carriers use the same vendor for building their networks, so it might be just some incompatibility thing between the iPhone and that equipment?

the one thing i would really be interested in would be to see other 3G phones on the networks that don't work very well with the iPhone (such as AT&T), and see whether they have the same problems with connecting calls and using the data service. that could be a pretty interesting starting point to figure out who's to blame...

cron for the iPhone

the New York Times iPhone app is really nice because it allows me to read headlines from the last couple of days. but it is much too slow loading news, which is understandable, because there is quite a bit of content that is being downloaded. (other than that, it is also really poorly programmed and crashes frequently, but that's not the point of this post.)

because iPhone apps cannot run in the background, the user experience of the app is pretty bad; instead of being able to read headlines, you have to wait while they are downloaded (and if you start scrolling or reading while the download is still active, it will constantly redraw and get in your way). it's probably hard to build such an app in a fundamentally better way (apart from the apparent weaknesses of how the UI is designed) given the limitations of the iPhone SDK.

if i could set the app to download the latest headlines every night at 2am or every 2 hours or whatever i think i need, this would be perfect. so what i want is some kind of cron-like facility for the iPhone. this way, apple would not have to be afraid of constantly running background apps, but i could still have apps doing useful things from time to time without me starting them explicitly.

apple's idea of a push server that will exclusively be able to send notifications to iPhones goes a little bit in that direction, but is much more limiting (which is the whole point of it). from what i understand, you can only send notifications and then these will be made available to the apps and they can display some kind of notification (like the little red numbers on the mail and phone apps). but that still means that after starting the app, it will have to start the download of the actual data. it could have done that conveniently at night, if only there was a way to give it control in the middle of the night.

maybe this pushes the idea of a phone-like device too far, but it is sad to see all that potential of a device like the iPhone, and then to see it limited by apple's claim that they make your life better by taking away options. they could easily introduce limitations for this kind of time-controlled applications to make them well-behaving. but then again, i can already see file sharing apps for the iPhone being activated every 2min, which would make AT&T very unhappy...

Could not activate Cellular Data Network

AT&T's problems with their 3G network now also seem to affect the data service (last week, data was working, but i could not make or receive calls). in the past few days, i got a lot of Could not activate Cellular Data Network messages, which must be the 3G equivalent of the GSM message Could not activate EDGE.

and since i cannot switch to GSM manually, these 3G problems are affecting my connectivity. i would be much happier if i could choose to fallback to the slower EDGE speeds and at least get a working data connection, instead of just getting a 3G error message.

safari and 3rd party applications often fail without any useful error message at all, not even giving useful information about the network problems. for example, safari often reports that Safari could not open the page because the server stopped responding, but what that really means is that the data service is not working and therefore it is impossible to connect to the server.

i guess apple still has to work a bit more on how to make the most out of what's available in terms of connectivity. not being able to make phone calls or use data transfer only because of AT&T's 3G problems does not seem to be the best solution. it cannot be that hard to be a bit smarter and try the GSM network instead of just saying Call Failed or Could not activate Cellular Data Network.

[[ update September 5: RTFM. Settings → General → Network takes you to a place where you can switch off 3G. so it is possible to switch off 3G manually, which gives you slow EDGE speeds, but at least the phone is working. it would be much more convenient if the phone would be smart enough to try GSM automatically when a 3G service (voice or data) fails. ]]

3G vs. GSM

since i got my new iPhone 3G a few days ago i became painfully aware of the fact that 3G technically means UMTS, which is an entirely new mobile network infrastructure. this means you get all the pains coming with that: poor coverage, unstable antenna availability, and problems with forwarding calls. all of that brought AT&T a lot of bad press already, but in a way i think this is simply what you get when you switch to an entirely new phone network.

on the other hand, the side effects are substantial. for the past three days, i could not receive any calls, callers were always connected to my voicemail. i could call mobile phones, but all calls to landlines failed. obviously, AT&T has massive problems forwarding calls between networks.

and because the UMTS network coverage is so spotty (even here in the east bay area), the theoretical advantage of higher 3G data speeds is often purely theoretical, because you get only an EDGE connection, or even worse, the phone tries to figure out what's going on and constantly switches between 3G and EDGE and then nothing at all happens.

so, while i am still willing to give AT&T some time to get their act together, what i really would like to have is a way to manually configure networks, so that i can set my iPhone to use only the GSM network. because being on 3G so far does not turn out to be a very satisfactory experience...

[[ update September 5: RTFM. Settings → General → Network takes you to a place where you can switch off 3G. ]]